Camp Dad
by M. E. Mishcon
The day dad left was not really the day he left. No way. He was gone long before that. Being the kid, hard to say exactly when he started to dematerialize but I do recall when he actually walked out. December 7, 1995. That was a day of infamy, all right.
Come to think of it, that day at our house did resemble Pearl Harbor...minus the palm trees. Around here, December, even early on, is all about ice and snow. But like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed (or, for me, the day Kurt Cobain offed himself) people tend to remember where they were when bad news hit. My grand dad, Papa, told me he was driving to the butcher when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Said he was listening to a Benny Goodman riff when the announcement came through. Stopped his car in the middle of Main Street and was rear ended by someone who was also shocked by the news. Me? I was in Janie Breslin’s finished basement when her little brother, Josh, ran down the steps chanting: "Kurt Cobain shot hisself in the head! Kurt Cobain shot hisself in the head, Kurt Cobain shot hisself in the head!"
The time with dad I was in the living room. Way ironic. My English teacher, Mr. Linder, would dig on my getting the meaning. Ironically, I was listening to my parents when I got it. Definition of Irony? What seems normal, isn’t.
For example, it seemed like a regular night. Dinner had been lentil loaf, mashed potatoes with the skins mixed in, green beans. Mom and dad were having their peppermint tea, talking in the kitchen, same old. From the living room it sounded kind of like music. Not Mo-Town, R&B, Rap, Jazz, Classical, Alternative, Metal, New Age, Rock, or even Folk. The Grup sound has a low bass and a slow rhythm, but picks up from time to time. Mostly it’s there’s a lot of words you can’t get, like those early R.E.M. songs. Anyway, I was lying on the blue corduroy couch that has, like, been in this house ever since I have, reading fucking Catcher In The Rye, if you want to know the truth. This added to my 10,000 league deep sense of irony.
They were talking anniversary, number fifteen. Actually way longer if you counted the living together part. But the married bit had been going on only ever since me. So, it was time to celebrate, right? A sign. Celebrations are always a cover-up. The way fucking birthday parties are all, ‘Hey-don’t-want-to-think-about-croaking-so-I’ll-party-hardy’.
I overheard dad say, "Ivy, I’d really rather not do a party, okay? I’m not in the mood."
Mom was cool. She said, "That’s okay. I’m not much into a party either. Too many parties this time of year. Why don’t we go off someplace. Shiva can stay with Nana and Papa."
It got quiet then. Like, too quiet for too long. The question just laid there like a dork on Ex. I tip-toed closer, caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the glass on the Jimi Hendrix poster. My eyebrows were high, my mouth in an o’ of surprise when dad said, "Where in hell would we go, Ivy?"
Mom shrugged. "I don’t know. Ireland? You’ve always wanted to go there. Or Italy? You said just the other day that you’d like to back to Italy. Or what about someplace spiritual, Israel, India even?"
"What’s with all the ‘I’ countries?"
Mom laughed, but I had heard the cleaver-sharp edge in dad’s tone. He had used that tone on me too. If I screwed ate junk food, refused to discuss the grassy knoll with him, dad would be there trimming me down with that tone.
"Fine, Will," Mom said. I guess she got sliced by the tone too, knew it. "Forget the countries. How about something closer to home? How about Woodstock? We could go back to Yazgur’s farm for a memory fest."
That’s when I heard The Nothing. It made the first silence seem like a concert. It went on like the well at Camp Half Moon. You dropped a rock down into it and no matter how long you waited, there was no splash at the end of the stone’s throw.
* * *
Dad found a place to live real quick considering that it can be hard to do that around here. We live in Vermont and that means tourists, vacation rentals, weekenders and all. Still, he landed a cabin right on Cake Lake.
Cake Lake. The beast of irony rearing its ugly head again.
It’s called Cake Lake because there’s a little round island in the middle of the water that sits way high and looks kind of like a birthday cake. You have to have some imagination about it. Anyway, dad set himself up in the guest house of some ‘area code’s’ estate. He packed up the good stereo, vinyls, tapes, CDS, banjo, skis, skates, snow shoes, back pack, tent, canoe, basketball, baseball mitt, and his wild cherry red Mix Master (dad likes to bake when he’s got a mind) into his brand new, vintage, mint, candy apple red, Mustang convertible. Should have guessed something was up when he got that car. Then he drove the six miles over to the new place on good old Cake Lake.
It was a while before he told me anything about why or even that he had left. But right off Mom pulled me into the kitchen, sat me down at our battered oak kitchen table, took my hand. "Shiva...your dad, well...he’s got some problems. Well, he’s...moved out. I think he may need, well, some time to...to...chill. Sort things out."
The whole time she was talking, Mom ran her long fingers over the rough part of my knuckles as if her fingers were matches and mine were the striking pad. I wanted her to stop. I didn’t want to hear her telling me this. I wanted to go call Janie, my best friend, whose biggest problem always had something to do with the Geometry homework. But I sat there, nodded, said I knew already, that we’d be okay. I said that we were together and screw dad if he couldn’t take a joke. Mom smiled but it was a shit-ass smile. Really, I have seen some hysterical crying that looked happier than that smile of Mom’s.
Never mind Geometry or English. What’s with Biology anyway? No sooner did I get my period than the hygiene teacher, Mrs. French, was all, "And someday you’ll go through menopause." What about guys? They must be mainlining some kick-butt hormonal toxin. No one seems to notice or care. Boys will be boys. Apparently, men will be boys, too. And girls? Well, we are women, hear us roar and all.
* * *
The first time dad had me out to his house was two months after he had moved. I mean, he never said good-fucking-bye until he was way gone for, like, a week. Anyway, by the time he invited me, I was past pissed, passed hurt, and just all curious.
From the outside his new place didn’t look like much. There were a whole lot of snow covered, rickety steps leading up to a snow piled deck that looked out onto the snow covered frozen lake. It was okay in a ‘rustic-run-away-from-home’ sort of way. Nothing like our clean, white Colonial with the forest green shutters, crescent moon cut outs on the top. Not that Mom stayed to compare domestic arrangements. She dropped me off. Literally. Didn’t hardly wait for me to get from the car before she tore ass out of there, dirty snow flying off the treads of the Jeep.
Dad waited for me on the top step smiling, bold. "Hey, Princess," he said.
I took my time climbing up. The snowy steps were slick with a fine sheen of ice. "Haven’t you heard, dad?" I said holding on to the shaky banister. "There’s been a coup d’etat. There’s a new princess in town."
He held the door for me, lifted his chin toward the lake. "There’s my heron. See it fly."
We stood there watching the long pointy thing, its spindly legs hanging while the wings stretched wide, taking it clear across the lake in seconds. "It’s a sight to see," he said. I didn’t argue with him.
Inside, I slipped out of my parka, looked around. The first impression I had of dad’s new place was of the color brown. The bare wooden floors, the long upright bench that stood for a couch, the threadbare, tweedy arm chair that served as his throne in this monochromatic kingdom. It was brown as dirt in there not counting his bright red Mix Master on a counter, a green folded up ping pong table in the corner, and (can’t believe this one!) a brandy new pin ball machine against the wall.
Pig-fucker.
That was the little nick name that I had come up with for dad. Not sure why, exactly. Don’t think he was actually doing it with swine. Just didn’t put it beneath him as a possibility. Looking at him standing there in Brown Town, arms crossed, narrow faced, bad toothy grin, nearly bald for fuck’s sake, he was all, ‘Welcome-to-my-world’. It reminded me of when Janie’s little brother, Josh, was just two and had finally crapped in the toilet and called us all in to take a look at it.
I just stood there as dad moved over to the area of the room that was assigned to act as kitchen. There was a mini-fridge, the kind that hotel rooms have stocked with stuff like macadamia nuts, tiny bottles of vodka and scotch. Only when he bent over to open it, I could see a quart of milk, a half-gallon of apple cider, and a half dozen eggs just as if he were a real person. It wasn’t just the fridge that was small, either. Everything in the place looked shrunken, as if dad had taken to living in a play house, the kind boys built up in a tree and didn’t allow girls into. There was a tiny sink, a tiny stove with two burners on top. There was a small cast iron pot filled with chili, stew, soup, something brown to match the decor. He went over to it, stirred. Have to say, it smelled okay.
Truth is, dad can cook. Bakes too. Big gooey, iced confections in combinations no one in their right mind would dream of...and for good reason. Last year, first thing in the morning he appeared at my bedroom door and held out a bright orange, three-layer job, candles blazing. Even had a slice with my juice because dad was big on birthday cake for breakfast. Thing is, I almost‘ralphed’. The cake part alternated lemon, maple, and lime with that super sweet orange icing found on those reject kid cupcakes. The cake looked great and all. Texture, moist, firm. It was, like all dad’s creations, a fucking commercial for Betty Crocker. But it didn’t taste good, go together, work. Thing is, dad made the sort of cake that should appear in a glossy photograph, not on your plate. Especially at breakfast. It was always such a let down.
Turned out the stuff on the stove was beef barley soup. Dad served it up in mismatched ceramic bowls. He poured apple cider into jelly glasses, put an uncut loaf of brown bread on the cutting board/dining table. Shit. He was making some sort of: ‘Hey-I’m-a-mid-life-crisis-monk’ point here. As if. If only. There was also a pile of empty wine bottles next to the sink. I had no idea what dad was doing when he wasn’t ladling out brown food in his brown room, but the sight of those bottles, still pink from red wine, told me it wasn’t all about earth tones. I stuck my spoon in the bowl, slurped. Thin, but flavory. Well, I said he could cook.
"Soup okay?" he asked leaning toward me.
I shrugged. He was not getting me that easy. "Fine I guess. Salty."
"Too salty?"
I pursed my lips. It struck me through that he cared what I thought. "No. Not too. I’ve got low blood pressure."
He dropped his spoon into the bowl and laughed, shook his head. His eyes got all squinty and, in that moment, he looked just like him. For a second I felt the way I used to, which was not exactly happy or anything ‘Nick at Night’ like that. But I used to feel like me. Which meant that things had a certain smell in my nose, taste in my mouth, feel in my hand. After dad left it was like the rules of the universe had changed. Even the law of gravity was up for grabs.
Maybe the soup wasn’t salty or the room too brown. Being the new me meant that I didn’t know what I thought or felt because nothing I had believed before had turned out to be true after all. I was in a strange country having to be fluent in a language I didn’t know squat about. And I was there with dad as my guide. Look where following him had gotten me so far.
"So," I said, "do you have a girlfriend or what?" It was my turn to lean forward, smile.
He stopped laughing abruptly. His face froze the way the on-screen picture does when the satellite dish goes out. The image stops in frame, goes modular, disintegrates into abstract blocks of color, and crumbles like a fallen mosaic before turning black.
He looked down at his shoes, sighed big, looked back up at me. "No Shiva, I don’t have a girlfriend. That’s not what this is all about."
"Well, I’m listening, dad. In fact, I’m all ears, except for my mouth," I said sticking the soup spoon into my maw and waiting. And it was okay waiting. My heart was doing the Pete Townshend thing on that live cut of ‘Tommy’. Charged, ready.
He nodded, sat backwards, let the chair tip back in that way that Mom wouldn’t let us do at home. "It’s hard to explain, Shiva."
"I’ll bet." I took the spoon out of my mouth, tapped it on the table.
He nodded and the chair fell forward with a ‘clack’. "Your mother and I...well, we’ve been together, like, forever. Since we were kids. Not much older than you are now."
"Really? Star crossed lovers at fifteen? And here I thought our last name was Crane, not Hatfield, McCoy, Capulet, or Montague."
At that instant, I didn’t care that he had left us as much as I couldn’t stand that his reasoning was so unoriginal. It was one thing to abandon us, another to be a total cliche. No, that’s a lie. I could take the cliche if he hadn’t left. Or if he’d come back. Guess I was like him, after all. Turned out I was a cliche, too.
He smiled, pulled at his chin. "You’re so smart. Really. I’m so proud of you even when you’re fresh like that because I can hear how smart you are. But, smart as you are, haven’t you ever wondered why your Mom and I didn’t have but one child?"
I shrugged, didn’t feel like answering. Of course I wondered. I bet every only child on the planet wonders that. I bet every orphan wonders why the parents split. For that matter, I bet every kid with brothers and sisters looks at the mob around them sometimes and thinks better of the situation and all. So it wasn’t a fair question. But then, it wasn’t a fair situation. And, anyway, I was well past the age when I expected fair in the course of world events. I mean, just look at Pearl Harbor, JFK, Viet Nam, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, not to mention that movies cost nearly eight bucks now. Fair. To paraphrase Tina Turner, 'What’s fair got to do with it?'
"I’ve thought about it. Guess I just figured that I was enough for both of you."
He nodded again. "You were. You are. But see, Shiv, when Mom got pregnant..."
I got his implication and it so sucked. It was as if he was taking the wrong end of a really big pencil and erasing me, brushing off the pink rubber bits, blowing me away. Fuck that. I was no mistake. I shook my head.
"You were there dad. You both got pregnant. We all did. Don’t you get it? Otherwise I wouldn’t be here and, guess what? I want to be." As soon as I said it, I knew it was true and felt real calm, the way you might just before the boat you are on is about to sink.
But he leaned back in his seat, started musing and all. "Sure, but I was young. I never got...I never had...a chance. My shot. I’ve been going through the motions, don’t you see? I’ve been doing the right thing all along. Acting as if, putting on a good face, pretending."
I stood up, walked over to him. "Could have fooled me."
I pushed him ever so slightly. His chair tilted back, balanced for a second, and then fell heavily to the floor with a loud ‘thwack’. He lay there, the wind knocked out him, blinking up at me. But he was all right. He’d live.
I grabbed my jacket to go. But before I stepped out the door, I caught that the look on his face was way familiar. Yeah, there was a family resemblance, all right. He looked just like me on that day of infamy.
The snow blew around on the deck. I pulled the zipper to my ski jacket up to my chin, looked out at the lake. That heron had taken off again, headed for Cake Island. I watched as its long legs unfolded like landing gear, saw it dip its head into the unfrozen section near the edge, come back up with a fish as green as a gummy bear. It swallowed the fish in one slurp, then took off again. Dad was right about one thing. It was a sight to see.
Then I trudged down the slippery steps and set off to walk the six miles back home.
M. E. Mishcon's work has appeared in Boston Magazine, New York
Magazine, Tallgrass Review, George Washington Review, Urthona, Sequoia, Berkshire Review,
The Artful Mind, The Women's Times, Thema, and The Mill Hunk Herald. She was a
semi-finalist for a Heekin Fellowship as well as the 1991 recipient of the Hackney award
for her novel, JUST BETWEEN US. She was the first place winner of the 2000 Serpentine
Fiction Contest, received Honorable Mention from Alaska's Exploration 2000 contest, and
was named one of four finalists for George and Mertie's Place. She was awarded Honorable
Mention for the New Millenium Awards for 2000 as well as in The Seven Hills Fiction Review
2001 and a finalist in the 2001 Glimmer Train Poetry Open. M.E. Mishcon is a practicing
psychotherapist. She lives, works, and shovels snow in the mountains of Western
Massachusetts with her husband, son, and Soft-Coated Wheaten Terrier.
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